A Brief Exchange on Coups in Africa

When I got up this morning, I had an email in my inbox from Patrick Mathangani, a writer for Kenya’s The Standard. He said he was researching a story on coups in Africa, had found my blog and piece for Foreign Policy on the subject, and wondered if I’d answer a few questions. I thought some of this blog’s readers might be interested in that exchange, too, so here are Mr. Mathangani’s questions and my replies.

In your 2013 forecast, 22 of these countries are in Africa. Checking through data over the years, the continent appears to have had more than its share of coups since the 1950s, perhaps explaining why coups have been seen as an African problem. Your analysis appears to confirm this. What’s your view on this?

I don’t think coups are an African problem so much as they’re a problem of poor countries with weak states, and Africa happens to have more than its fair share of those. We’ve seen the same pattern in every other part of the world, just at different times in history. Latin America, for example, suffered lots of coups in the 1960s and 1970s, but the incidence dropped off sharply in the past couple of decades as most countries in the region got less poor and more democratic—and, crucially, after the Cold War ended and the U.S. and USSR stopped sponsoring or supporting coups in the region as a way to scratch at each other.

I expect we’ll see the same decline in the frequency of coups in Africa as more and more countries get into positive spirals of development. We’ve already seen a decline in the post-Cold War period, probably due to the end of those superpower proxy struggles, and I’m guessing that current patterns of economic growth and democratization will solidify that shift just as they did in Latin America and Europe before.

What, in your view, makes Africa such fertile ground for coups?

I think my answer to number 1 goes about as far as I can on this question. I’m sure there are other aspects, too, but I’ll leave those to the regional pros to address.

This year, we’ve had two distinct political events in Africa that show a sharp contrast and mixed fortunes for the continent’s push for good governance. These are a seamless transition in Kenya, and a coup in CAR. What do these portend for Africa’s future and struggle for democracy?

As William Gibson supposedly said, “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” To me, Kenya looks like a state that’s on the edge of that virtuous cycle of development I mentioned earlier, while CAR still isn’t even really a state in the conventional sense.

It’s interesting to see Tanzania, Kenya’s neighbour, at number 22 in your list. Tanzania has been relatively stable, why does it land on the model?

Tanzania ranks relatively high on the list because in spite of its reputation as a stable democracy, it’s got the basic features that have historically been associated with the occurrence of coups. Most notably, it’s got a high infant mortality rate relative to most of the world, political institutions that combine features of democracy and authoritarianism, and sharply polarized politics.

Now, it’s worth underscoring that the risk of a coup attempt in any one country in any given year is generally very low, even in the countries toward the top of those rankings. There are usually only a handful of coups and failed coup attempts worldwide each year, so the best prediction for even the highest-risk countries will almost always be that no coup will occur. If the forecasting models are working well, then all or nearly all of the coup attempts we do see will occur in the couple of dozen countries at the top of the annual rankings. Those rankings most definitely do not mean that we should expect to see coup attempts in all of those countries, and that certainly goes for Tanzania, too.

Grant

This post reminds me of a question I’ve had for the past couple weeks. Why have the events in CAR been referred to as a coup? Doesn’t it make more sense to view this as an insurgency, rebellion, or even civil war? Now, I don’t think the COW threshold of 1000 battle deaths was met, but the dynamics do not seem to line up with a coup.

While this is of course a definitional issue, I think this is important to clarify for the sake of future analyses of CAR, the surrounding region, and in ensuring that our data sets code the event properly.

I agree that it doesn’t meet the conventional academic definition of a coup—which is also the definition I use for my forecasting models—and said as much on Twitter. I suppose there’s a little wiggle room in the fact that several Seleka leaders had supposedly become part of a power-sharing government as part of the peace deal that didn’t stick, but it looks a lot more like a rebel victory in a civil war than a coup d’etat. Of course, “coup” has got to be one of the most overstretched word in the political lexicon, so good luck winning any arguments on the semantics of that one.